Search form

Fanvideo

This Roadmap lists the various features and services that we hope to be able to offer fan video makers. Our priorities are stability and sustainability — we want to build services that will work long-term with our resources, and that will help protect fan videos in a changing legal and economic climate.

Our Roadmap includes:

1. Resources for Fan Video creators

The OTW will host a collection of information and resources we hope will be useful to the larger community of fan video makers.

Resources will include:

instructions on How To Stream Video From Your Own Site

instructions on how to dispute a YouTube takedown or file a DMCA counternotice; note: this will not be legal advice, but procedural information

a bibliography of all academic and legal articles on vidding

a library of vids discussed in scholarly articles: we will also provide a point of contact for scholars who plan to publish so that future articles and books have stable references and footnotes.

the existing Vidding History project, the Test Suite, etc.

When This Can Happen: Available now! (If you have suggestions for additional information we ought to host, or are willing to help us write or maintain any of these pages, please contact the vidding committee via their webform.)

2. A Dark Archive

The goal of the dark archive is to store and protect fan videos: a sort of communal video vault. The dark archive will not be online or generally accessible: the goal is for people whose videos might otherwise be lost to have a copy stored in a secure and responsible place come vidapocalypse. If vidders place copies of their videos with us, we could restore copies to them in case of TOSing or computer failure. We will be asking video makers who want to deposit copies of their videos to fill out a form telling us what we can and can't do with them; it is possible that the Dark Archive could at some point be used to form the core of a torrent seeding drive (see #3, #5 below).

We would ideally partner with conventions that have vid shows to preserve their collections as well.

When This Can Happen: In progress.

Resources Needed: Either external hard drives and back up drives or large, static server space in the cloud; space is cheap but drives can fill up with video very quickly. People power: catalogers, maintainers, administrators. Librarians experienced with dark archives a plus.

3. A Torrent of Our Own (TO3)

A bittorrent tracker open to registered users to post torrents for fair-use transformative fanworks, including: vids, fic trailers, fan art, zine pdfs, AMVs, political remix, machinima, and other transformative digital fanworks. Users will be able to download without a password. Before posting, uploaders will have to read about fair use standards and agree that what they're uploading is a transformative fanwork. TO3 users will be able to add torrent urls to the AO3 work template alongside embeds from streaming sites, if any (see #4); this will allow vidders to have all their works in one place, take advantage of the AO3's tagging system, provide a stable home for comments, etc.

Note 1: Sharing transformative works over peer-to-peer networks is LEGAL: however, we will have a zero tolerance policy for piracy, and abusers will be banned.

Note 2: The more people use the TO3, the stronger the TO3 swarm will become, and the better for the our eventual plan to stream torrents, (feature #5, below.)

Note 3: We hope that the AO3 will be eventually be able to seed copies of videos and fan art for the TO3; this will however require significant additional resources and will not be part of the initial stage of the TO3.

When This Can Happen: In Progress.

Resources Needed: Technical personnel to select, implement, and brand the tracker and uploader registration system; dedicated and enthusiastic volunteers to promote the swarm among fans far and wide (tell your friends!); users with the ability to seed video.

4. AO3 Embed Code

The OTW's Accessibility, Design, and Technology Committee (AD&T) will work on the code for embedding fanart and fan video in the AO3. When this is coded, we will be able to host embeds from YouTube or other streaming sites, including a fan's own site (see #1), alongside torrent urls (#3) or other pertinent information. Fan video makers will be able to change the source of a video's embed without losing meta-information, tags, and comments.

When This Can Happen: Available Now!

5. Integration of the TO3 into the AO3

Our hope is to eventually be able to stream video from torrents in the TO3 within the AO3, so that each AO3 vid would offer both a stream and a torrent for downloading.

Ideally, the OTW would be able to convert the Dark Archive (#2) into the core of a vid-seeding drive, either from the cloud or from hard drives spread over the computers of an organized group of volunteers, each of whom would take a sub-section of the total archive.

Note that successful implementation of this integration involves several challenges: 1) the TO3 will have to be fairly robust; 2) we will have to implement the Swarmplayer or similar technology for streaming from torrents; 3) if the OTW has to seed a significant number of vids to maintain availability and/or performance, this will require a significant ongoing financial commitment; 4) stabilization of best practices for fair use video.

When This Can Happen: This is a long-term plan which would require a high level of stability on the Archive of Our Own as well as a significant amount of resources. This will happen after Release 1.0 of the Archive of Our Own — assuming the Dark Archive, TO3, and AO3 continue to develop as planned, we’d start work on this full integration in about two years.

Resources Needed: Additional financial resources to ensure ongoing stability; lots of people power needed to code, test, administer and support the AO3 and TO3.

Fans create a wide variety of multimedia works, including fan art, vids, anime music videos, political remixes, fan films, fan trailers, machinima, podfic and audiobooks, and others. The OTW is committed to providing access to and preserving the history of these works, and our Fan Video and Multimedia projects are intended both to provide information and resources to the larger fan video community and to help explain and contextualize these works to the larger world.

Fan Video Roadmap

Resources for Fan Video creators

The following pages feature information we hope will be useful to fan video creators; if you have a suggestion for a page to be hosted here, or new suggestions or corrections to existing pages, please contact us.

Scholarly Archive of Multimedia Works (coming soon): A library of fan videos discussed in scholarly articles: we will also provide a point of contact for scholars who plan to publish so that future articles and books have stable references and footnotes.

Vidding History Projects

The OTW currently has particular legal and scholarly expertise in live-action media fan vidding; our Vidding History projects aim to provide services to the vidding community and explain and contextualize vidding to the larger world. Current projects include: the Vidding Oral History Project, the Test Suite of Fair Use Vids, and Vidding (2008), a documentary produced by the OTW for MIT's New Media Literacy project. Much of the OTW's legal work has been vidding-related as well; you can find out more about that at our legal advocacy page.

The Dark Archive

The goal of the dark archive will be to store and protect vids; this archive will not be online or generally accessible. See the Fan Video Roadmap for more information.

Torrent of Our Own

The Torrent of Our Own will be a private tracker for fair-use transformative fanworks, including: vids, fic trailers, fan art, zine pdfs, AMVs, political remix, machinima, and other transformative digital fanworks. See the Fan Video Roadmap for more information.

This may displace vidders (again!) who put their work at places like Bam Vid Vault and other networks after the fall of Imeem; we're also going to see more disruption of vidding communities. We remind you to document yourself and other fans on Fanlore so that people looking for you and your work can find you regardless of what platforms, services, or networks you use--and yes, yes, we need A Vidding Archive of Our Own!

I have often described the coming battle over online video as Godzilla vs. Mothra--that is to say, a battle which will be fought out among corporate behemoths much more powerful than any vidder. Reel one of this monster movie is starting: Viacom vs. Google. This week, both sides released paperwork detailing their claims and accusations; at stake is YouTube, and even more specifically, the DMCA's "safe harbor" provision--which is just the little detail which has made most of the internet possible. (Short, IANAL version: "safe harbor" means that you can't hold internet services liable for everything their users do with them. If streaming sites, web ISPs, social networks, etc. had to guarantee that nobody would ever use them to do, publish, or share anything illegal, they wouldn't be able to function.)

For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom...As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.

Is it too much to hope that Viacom flounces and deletes all its journals in a huff?

Here's a case that vidders might want to keep an eye on. Vimeo is being sued by a number of record companies--EMI, Capitol, Virgin--over audio tracks, which "are too often unlicensed copies of full songs." You can read more about the case at arstechnica.com: Vimeo sued; have staffers uploaded infringing content? While the suit seems to want to leave some space for transformative works--as the article notes, EMI is "careful to say that it is 'not seeking to stifle creativity or preclude members of the public from creating original, lawful audiovisual works,'" it also wants to stop usage of "the entire musical work deliberately and carefully synchronized into the video."

Obviously we at the OTW disagree with the implication that the use of music "in careful synchronization" is automatically infringing. Music can be an interpretive tool, and vids are a form of speech: they show, they demonstrate, they make arguments. In a vid, music is not a "soundtrack"; it is an essential part of the argument and creates a new--intricate, and richly meaningful--whole.

From the business section of the Guardian this week: Google seeks to turn a profit from YouTube copyright clashes. The article's subtitle gives you the gist: "Group is working to persuade music and video companies to cash in rather than clamp down when their content is uploaded." In short, Google wants to use their content fingerprinting system to report uses--even transformed uses--to copyright holders and then to offer them the chance to put ads on user-generated content. There's lots wrong with that, but perhaps the wrongest is the idea that the companies have the right to take things down because "because the use does not fit the original's values." C'mon, Google! Don't be evil!

You might think fighting robots only happens in video games, in which case: read the The Slow Road to Fair Use: Why it Takes Three Weeks to Post Your Youtube Video, a guest post by video remixer IKAT381 at politicalremixvideo.com. IKAT381 chronicles the three week--but ultimately successful--slog to get a vid up on YouTube, a process that included fighting the upload bot, which did an automatic takedown, lodging a dispute through YouTube's built-in online tool, and then lodging a DMCA counternotice when the dispute was denied (by another bot?) in favor of UMG, the record company that owned the Weezer song.

Persistence paid off, but as IKAT381 points out, "imagine if I was a career artist who wanted to dedicate more time to creating than to looking up copyright law and counter-notice procedures. Or imagine I had kids, or school, or any number of things that might be more important to me than being a copyright geek."

IKAT381 concludes: In the year 2009, copyright disputes have been taken over by robots. In the year 2010, copyright disputes should be handled by people.

Public Knowledge, a Washington, D.C.-based public interest group working to defend citizens' rights in the digital culture, has just done a four part "TV" series called, "We Are Creators, Too."

Part One features Nina Paley, the brilliant independent filmmaker and animator who made Sita Sings The Blues, whose release was tied up over music rights: while the actual recordings she used (from 1927) were in the public domain, the "sync licenses" were exorbitant.

Parts Two and Three feature Elisa Kreisinger and Jonathan McIntosh of Political Remix Video; Elisa's political remixes, including "Queer Housewives of New York City (Real Housewives Remix)", can be found at elisakreisinger.com; Jonathan's political remixes, including, "So You Think You Can Be President?" and the recent "Buffy vs. Edward" can be found at rebelliouspixels.com.

Part Four features OTW board member Francesca Coppa talking about vidding and vid culture, as well as the work of the OTW. (Francesca was also recently interviewed over at Geek Feminism, where she talks about the Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, and where the OTW is vis a vis a vidding archive.)

The Summer, 2009 issue of Cinema Journal features a section on fandom in general and vidding in particular edited by TWC's Kristina Busse and featuring a number of members of TWC's editorial board. (Yes, that's a shot from Lim's "Us" on the cover!) The issue is currently being mailed to subscribers, but eventually will be online at JStor and available through academic search engines in libraries and such.

In Focus: Fandom and Feminism
Gender and the Politics of Fan Production

"Introduction," by Kristina Busse
"A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness," by Francesca Coppa
"A Fannish Field of Value: Online Fan Gift Culture," by Karen Hellekson
"Should Fan Fiction Be Free?" by Abigail De Kosnik
"User Penetrated Content: Fan Video in the Age of Convergence," by Julie Levin Russo
"Living in a Den of Thieves: Fan Video and Digital Challenges to Ownership," by Alexis Lothian

Edited to add: Not sure for how long this file will be available, but the "In Focus" section can currently be found on the SCMS website here (right-click and save).